The seven consolidation days went by without incident. Wei Liang learned to see this as its own kind of information. The absence of disruption did not mean stability; it simply meant disruption had not yet arrived.
He approached those seven days differently than he did cultivation nights. There was no Time Compression. The Ledger made it clear that consolidation needed natural settling, and he trusted a function that had already fixed one mistake he hadn't noticed. Instead, he focused on reading.
Over four months of careful access to the records storage room, he had gained a solid understanding of the Iron Hollow Sect's ore processing methods, its resource allocation, three partial histories of the Eastern Cradle region, and one document that was misfiled among the supply inventories. This document was clearly not part of the supplies; it was a theoretical text on qi-element interactions. The formal style showed that its author was likely more educated than whoever managed the sect's filing system.
The theoretical text was the most valuable find in the storage room, and he had read it eleven times.
It explained the behavior of rare element roots in environments filled with non-aligned qi. The author argued that rare elements—Void, Chaos, Primal—did not absorb ambient qi like standard elements. Standard roots filtered ambient qi for their aligned element and passed the rest. Rare roots practiced what the author called *inversion processing*—they absorbed the discarded portions standard roots ignored, converting them through an internal mechanism the author admitted was not fully understood.
Wei Liang had first read this with academic interest.
Now, he read it with the attention of someone who had felt a thread of qi enter a hollow space and understood that the hollow was not a deficiency, but a description.
He copied the relevant sections onto the back of a used quota record, using a small writing style that made it hard to read from a casual distance, and returned the original to its misfiled position.
---
Layer Two began on the hundred and seventeenth night.
The difference from Layer One was clear—not in difficulty, but in character. Layer One established that the root could function at all. Layer Two focused on building that function, expanding the cord into something that could carry more. The qi demand increased. The ore pieces he had collected depleted more quickly.
Now, he had seventeen pieces—five additional medium-grade, three that the Ledger classified as high-grade based on density. He was careful with the high-grade pieces, using them in small amounts, because high-grade ore produced stronger qi seepage. Stronger seepage meant larger fluctuations, and fluctuations were most likely to draw a cultivator's attention if someone happened to be looking in the right direction at the right moment.
No one was currently paying attention. He continuously tracked this through the Ledger's passive lie-detection function, which had developed an unexpected benefit: prolonged exposure to a person's normal communication patterns made deviations easier to spot. He now knew Bao's tells precisely. He recognized which workers were hiding minor infractions from the shift records. He knew that the junior disciple assigned to the morning rotation check was consistently reporting completion of checks he had not actually performed.
None of this was immediately useful, but he filed it away.
Layer Two's first session resulted in a bottleneck notification after forty minutes: *Secondary qi gate integration incomplete. Current technique routes qi through primary gate only during expansion phase. Dual-gate integration required for Layer Two stability. Correction: modify stage six expansion sequence to include parallel routing.*
He stopped, revised, and tested.
The parallel routing added complexity to the session, but the stability improvement was immediate—the Ledger's notation updated from 34% layer stability to 61% after implementing the correction. He filed the pattern: the technique he had rebuilt worked but still carried assumptions from the original document that the Ledger identified only when they became active problems. He began reviewing each stage ahead of time rather than waiting for the bottleneck notification.
He recognized this as the true lesson from the Bottleneck function—not just specific corrections, but the habit of reviewing structure before applying it. He was becoming a better technician with the help of a record-keeper that clearly had opinions about methodology.
He noted this and felt no discomfort. The source of useful information mattered less than its accuracy.
---
On the hundred and thirty-first day, something shifted in the mountain.
He first noticed it through the ore.
He was working on Section Seven's primary vein face when the Ledger's continuous scan produced a notation he had never seen: *Ambient qi-density in current section: elevated 340% above baseline. Source: below current depth. Duration of elevation: ongoing. First detected: approximately 6 hours prior.*
He kept swinging his pickaxe without changing his rhythm and thought about this.
A 340% increase over baseline meant the qi in the rock around him was much denser than it had been yesterday. The ore pieces he extracted today would contain more qi than their standard density readings. A cultivator with a functioning root might sense it as pressure—a warmth in their meridians, an unusual ease in their qi cycling.
He checked the Ledger's margin notation on the secondary passage.
*Void Vein Terminus: pulse cycle altered. Previous rhythm: 4.3-second interval. Current rhythm: 2.1-second interval. Classification: accelerating. Cause: unknown. Cross-reference: seal condition notation—intact, 300 years, 4 months, 17 days. Update pending.*
He finished his shift, met his quota, and left at the seventh bell with everyone else.
That evening at dinner, he watched the cultivator disciples at the far table—the ones assigned to mine supervision, low-ranked outer disciples for whom this posting was a minor punishment or a temporary assignment before something better. Two of them rubbed their hands together in a way that was not about warmth. One rotated his wrist slowly, as people do when their meridians feel off.
They had sensed the elevation. They didn't understand what it meant. He observed their conversation from across the room—too far to hear, close enough to read their body language. They appeared confused. They dismissed it. Their conclusion ended with a shrug and a return to their food. To them, it was something minor, likely to sort itself out.
He noted their conclusion and recognized it was wrong, but correcting it was neither his responsibility nor his interest.
---
He entered the secondary passage on the hundred and thirty-third day, during the four-minute window before the morning rotation check, carrying only his work lamp and the justification of a wrong turn if questioned—thin, but enough for someone who was not under close watch.
The descent felt different right away. The atmospheric pressure the Ledger tracked had increased—it was still non-lethal for him and still neutral in interaction with his Void root, but felt heavier as if he were moving through thicker air.
The chamber at the bottom was not as he had left it.
The vertical split in the far wall had widened. Where it had been about three centimeters on his first visit, it was now closer to fifteen. The blue-black light coming through it was stronger and seemed to move—not flickering, not pulsing, but circulating slowly as light didn't normally do. The floor, which had been flat, now had a network of cracks radiating outward from the base of the split.The Ledger updated immediately: *Void Vein Terminus: seal degradation detected. Integrity assessment revised from intact to compromised; estimated 73% remaining integrity. Rate of degradation: accelerating. Projected timeline to critical threshold: indeterminate. Cause of degradation: unknown. Note: previous record entry designated seal condition as maintained by external mechanism. No external mechanism currently detectable.*
He stared at the split for a long moment.
Something on the other side was breathing.
Not literally; there was no sound, no air movement. But the light moved in rhythm with something that had its own time, its own slow biological logic that had nothing to do with stone, mineral, or the known world.
He stayed for six minutes. He recorded everything the Ledger would allow. He noted the crack pattern on the floor, the exact width of the split, and the light's rhythm—now at a 1.8-second cycle, still accelerating.
He left.
He was fourteen years old and at Qi Condensation Layer One, thirty percent into Layer Two's consolidation. Whatever was on the other side of that split was sealed behind stone that was losing its integrity at an accelerating rate, in a passage under a sect that did not know the passage existed.
He ran no simulation. He had too little data on the entity to model it.
What he had was the Ledger's note about an external mechanism that no longer existed and the memory of a Sect Master he had seen carried through the compound on a covered stretcher three weeks ago. Those two facts sat next to each other in his mind with the specific weight of things that belonged in the same account.
He filed it away. He went to his shift.
The mountain's pulse counted its seconds faster than it had the day before.